Arms purports that challenges in digital libraries cannot be solved through new laws or technology. Instead, social information customs should be created first.
There are two economic models for digital libraries: open access and payment systems. Open access libraries are usually funded by grants, advertising, the government, or private individuals. Payment systems are funded by annual or monthly subscriptions, hourly rates, rates based on the number of workstations providing access, rates based on the number of simultaneous users, or rates based on the number of digital objects accessed. Arms says subscription is the most popular payment form because it is predictable. Libraries prefer subscriptions because they allow for the widest, simplest access.
Arms discusses the frustrating cycle of scholarly publishing in which academic libraries must pay exorbitant prices for their own faculty's articles by going through middlemen like Elsevier. He blames universities for using the quantity of published articles as a basis for faculty promotion and awards. "Because prestige comes from writing many papers," writes Arms, "they have an incentive to write several papers that report slightly different aspects of a single piece of research."
Though most academic libraries use electronic databases for journal access, there are three main flaws in this system:
- If the publisher goes out of business or changes its database coverage, the library is left with neither current articles nor archives.
- In order to maintain profits, publishers sell database subscriptions in bundles, which forces libraries to subscribe to less-favored databases in order to secure a reasonable price on the essential ones.
- Patrons' rights involving the use of articles is murky. Some restrictions would prevent users from printing or saving copies of articles for individual use.
Access management is the policies that authorize users to access digital libraries, whether open or fee-based. The two parties in access management are the information managers, who create and implement policies, and the users, who must authenticate their roles.
Users may authenticate their roles by what they know (such as a username and password), what they own (such as a smart-card), where they are (i.e., at a particular IP address) and who they are (via biometrics, for instance). Common user roles are determined by group association (such as a Pitt student), location (someone at a Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh computer), subscription (someone paying a monthly fee to an online journal), robotic use (a spider crawling the Web), or payment (a user is paying per view). Users may be restricted in their computing actions and to what extent they may use a digital object.
Enforcing access management policies is tricky: too many controls can turn off users but too few controls may invite abuse. Some digital library operators choose fewer controls, knowing that happy users will be repeat customers and therefore compensate for profits lost to illegal users. Arms advocates displaying an access statement to users; in some cases this bears the strength of the law.
Digital library security and authenticity can be ensured via firewalls, encryption, watermarking and digital signatures.
Lesk on Economics
Lesk links library economies to publishing industry economies and says that digital libraries will need new funding strategies in an era of skyrocketing information prices. Libraries have difficulty with funding, he says, because users do not appreciate the value of library holdings and operations.
Lesk mentioned the idea of a library as a "buying club" where users are motivated to participate because sharing resources is cheaper than buying personal copies for permanent use. This is an interesting notion, but it paints the library as only an on-demand information source, not an institution upholding preservation and literacy. Publishers do not always win through the buying club model, but it does seem best for the average user.
Another economic model that Lesk considers is transclusion, in which users must pay to see quotations in an article. In exchange for a fee, the user will be directed from the original work to the cited work. Such a model, at least for the average undergraduate or graduate researcher, is prohibitive. I doubt a freshman would pay to see such information; the fees would likely drive her to cheaper, less reputable sources.
Lesk discusses copyright law's adverse effects on users. Since the Berne Convention, works do not need to bear copyright notices, dates or authors. Thus, finding the work's author or owner may be impossible.
This article is outdated, so I wonder if what Lesk says about authors avoiding online publishing is still true. Are faculty today loathe to publish in open access journals because their deans may not consider it tenure-worthy work?
One item in this chapter surprised me. I have seen lots of suggestions on how libraries can save money, but I had never seen advertising suggested as a way to get funding. How might this work? Instead of making a patron pay to see an online article, might he view a 5-second ad first? Or would library shelves have sponsor posters tacked to each end, just as corporate names line a football stadium? This suggestion is far more disturbing to me than resorting to pay-per-view research. Libraries are the last public places without advertising, and we should try to keep them that way.
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